Tag Archives: Bill O’Reilly

TV News Record: Coverage of sexual harassment charges

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A biweekly round up on what’s happening at the TV News Archive by Katie Dahl and Nancy Watzman.

This week we dive into research resources, fact-checks, and backgrounders on the sexual harassment charges sweeping the worlds of media, politics, and entertainment.

Past TV news appearances by O’Reilly, Franken, Halperin & more preserved, searchable

The names of well-known and influential men accused of sexual harassment continue to pile up: Louis C.K.; Rep. John Conyers, D., Mich.; Sen. Al Franken, D., Minn.; Mark Halperin of ABC; Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame; NBC’s Matt Lauer, Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore; Fox’s Bill O’Reilly; Charlie Rose of CBS and PBS; Leon Wieseltier, formerly of The New Republic; Harvey Weinstein, and of course the president himself, Donald Trump.

Some of these men made their living on TV and all of them have many TV appearances preserved in the TV News Archive. These include, for example, clips making the rounds in this week’s stories about Lauer’s television history: this one where NBC staff did a fake joke story about Lauer himself being harassed by a colleague; and this interview with the actress Anne Hathaway after a photographer took a photo up her skirt and a tabloid printed it.

We’ve also got this September 2017  interview Lauer did of Bill O’Reilly, in which he asks the former Fox News host: “Have you done some soul searching? Have you done some self-reflection and have you looked at the way you treated women that you think now or think about differently now than you did at the time?” O’Reilly answers, “My conscience is clear.”


TV news use of term “sexual harassment” peaked in 2011

Mentions of term “sexual harassment” since 2009 on cableTV news shows, source: Television Explorer search of TV News Archive caption data

Cable TV news programs mentions of the term “sexual harassment” are picking up, but not yet at the level they were back in November 2011, according to a search of TV News Archive caption data via Television Explorer. What was big news then? Accusations of sexual harassment against then presidential candidate Herman Cain, who the following month dropped out of the 2012 race. Cain was back on TV this week, in an interview on the current claims of sexual harassment against powerful men, on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle.

Cain says: “Now, what’s different about my situation, and let’s just say Roy Moore’s situation, is that they came after me with repeatedly attacks and accusations, but no confirmation. They now believe that if they throw more and more and more mud on the wall, that eventually people are going to believe it. But that has backfired because, as you know, the latest poll shows Roy Moore is now back in the lead in Alabama, and the people in Alabama are going to have to decide.”


Fact-checks and backgrounders on sexual harassment charges

Our fact-checking partners have produced numerous fact-checks and background pieces on sexual harassment charges and statements.

“How politicians react to such charges often appears to reflect who is being accused. Democrats are quick to jump on allegations about Republicans — and vice versa. But the bets start to get hedged when someone in the same party falls under scrutiny,” writes Meg Kelly for The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker.

For example, here’s House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D. Calif., on “Meet the Press” in 1998, defending then-President Bill Clinton. At the time, Pelosi said, referring to the investigation by Ken Starr into allegations against Clinton: “The women of America are just like other Americans, in that they value fairness, they value privacy, and do not want to see a person with uncontrolled power, uncontrolled time, uncontrolled – unlimited money investigating the president of the United States.”

And here’s President Donald Trump on the White House south lawn, defending GOP Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore: “Roy Moore denies this. That’s all I can say. And by the way, he totally denies it.”

Kelly also wrote a round-up of sexual harassment charges against the president himself: “During the second presidential debate, Anderson Cooper asked then-candidate Trump point blank whether he had “actually kiss[ed] women without consent or grope[d] women without consent?” Trump asserted that “nobody has more respect for women” and Cooper pushed him, asking, “Have you ever done those things?” Trump denied that he had, responding: “No, I have not.”…But it’s not as simple as that. Many of the women have produced witnesses who say they heard about these incidents when they happened — long before Trump’s political aspirations were known. Three have produced at least two witnesses.”

In another piece, Glenn Kessler, editor of The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, writes  in a round up of corroborators, “Such contemporaneous accounts are essential to establishing the credibility of the allegation because they reduce the chances that a person is making up a story for political purposes. In the case of sexual allegations, such accounts can help bolster the credibility of the “she said” side of the equation.” One of the statements of denial he quotes is this one from White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who says when asked if all of the accusers are lying: “Yeah, we’ve been clear on that from the beginning, and the president’s spoken on it.”


Here’s FactCheck.org’s Eugene Kiely on Sen. Tim Kaine, D., Va., and his claim that the Clinton campaign can’t give back contributions from Harry Weinstein: “Asked if the Clinton-Kaine campaign will return contributions it received from movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, Sen. Tim Kaine repeatedly said the campaign is over. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean the campaign can’t refund donations.” FactCheck.org deemed this claim “misleading.”

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Find O’Reilly Factor clips on TV News Archive

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With yesterday’s announcement Fox News had ousted Bill O’Reilly from the helm of “The O’Reilly Factor,” following mounting complaints of sexual harassment, the pugilistic host’s reign as the “king of cable news” passes into history.

However, a good portion of that American political history is preserved for posterity as part of the TV News Archive, the Internet Archive’s searchable collection of television news. We’ve got some 3,000 hours of “The O’Reilly Factor” dating back to 2009,  including at least 20 segments that have been fact-checked by PolitiFact.

Perhaps O’Reilly described his mission best with his response to a viewer, who urged him in October 2016, “Stick to the facts, not your personal opinion.” Said O’Reilly: “The O’Reilly factor is built around my personal opinions, sir. Twenty years…thus the name: ‘The O’Reilly Factor.'”

Here are several fact-checked O’Reilly highlights from recent years:

Guns.  O’Reilly claimed that  Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland “voted, so the folks know, in Washington, D.C., to keep guns away from private citizens.” PunditFact: “False….Garland didn’t vote on this case at all.” (March 2016.)

Crime. From 2014 to 2015, said O’Reilly in October 2015, Austin’s “murder rate is up a whopping 83 percent.” PolitiFact Texas: Mostly False. “[I]f O’Reilly had pulled back the camera, so to speak, he could have determined that Austin appears on pace to have a lower murder rate in 2015 than in 2014.”

Iran, China, and Russia. O’Reilly: Russia and China “absolutely said pretty clearly” they would not keep economic sanctions on Iran if the United States “walked away from the deal.” This time O’Reilly earned a “Mostly True,” from PolitiFact: “O’Reilly is pushing the envelope when he said “absolutely” clear, as they haven’t issued formal statements. But all of their actions indicate that what O’Reilly said is substantially accurate.”

Muslims cheering 9-11. “Thousands of Muslims, regular folks, celebrated in the streets… . these people are a minority but they were not called out in any official way by Muslim nations around the world.” PolitiFact: “Half True.” “So far as we can tell, there was no official condemnation of people celebrating the 9/11 attacks. However, Muslim governments, and religious leaders, condemned the attacks themselves, as did many average Muslims.”

There’s more! Popcorn fact-check annotation experiment

For a reel of fact-checks of O’Reilly statements over the years, check out this compilation created with a recent version of Mozilla’s Popcorn editor by TV News Archive Director Roger Macdonald.

Popcorn allows viewers to feed TV News Archive video into an editor and mix it up with other videos, add text annotations, hyperlinks, and more. We believe this is a glimpse of the future: giving people the tools to put the messages that bombard them in context, rather than being passive viewers.

Mozilla launched the innovative tool in 2012; while they no longer support it, the source code is open for others to improve. Please be patient with occasional buffering glitches.  Try clicking on some of the text for links and the orange quote icon link to citations.  And, if you want to go wild, click the arrows triangle icon and try your hand at remixing.

If impatient with problems playing the Popcorn version, here is a plain-old mp4.  No embedded links or remix options.

This week’s TV news highlights with fact checks

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by Katie Dahl

As part of a new regular feature, the Internet Archive presents highlights from our national fact checking partners of TV news segments aired over the past week. These include President Donald Trump’s assertion that the number of police officers killed on the beat has increased; his latest attack on the press; his claim that sanctuary cities breed crime; the proposition that Nordstrom’s decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s apparel line was political;  several Trump statements from his Super Bowl interview with O’Reilly, and background on the silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D., Mass., on the floor of the Senate. 

Claim: Number of officers shot and killed in line of duty increased (true)

Trump earned a rare “Gepetto’s checkmark” for truthfulness from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker when he told a gathering of law enforcement that, “The number of officers shot and killed in the line of duty last year increased by 56 percent from the year before.” Reporter Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote, “Trump’s grim statistic seemed too remarkable to be correct:…But the figure is solid. Last year was a notable year in police deaths, largely because of the number of police officers who were fatally shot in ambush attacks across the country.”

Claim: press doesn’t want to report on terrorism (wrong)From our Trump Archive: in describing “radical islamic terrorist” attacks around the world, President Trump claimed the “very very dishonest press doesn’t want to report” them. The fact-checkers at PolitiFact found no evidence for this assertion, rating the claim as “Pants on Fire”: “The media may sometimes be cautious about assigning religious motivation to a terrorist attack when the facts are unclear or still being investigated. But that’s not the same as covering them up through lack of coverage.” Reporters at FactCheck.org called Trump’s claim “nonsense.”

Claim: Sanctuary cities breed crime (no evidence)

Also from the Trump Archive: in an interview on FOX News, host Bill O’Reilly asked for Trump’s reaction to news that officials in California are discussing whether to become a sanctuary state. Trump responded that he is opposed to sanctuary cities, saying they “breed crime.” PolitiFact reporter Allison Graves wrote that there isn’t much research on the impact of sanctuary cities on crime, but that at least one recent study shows no effect on crime rates. Michelle Ye Hee Lee gave the claim “three Pinocchios” from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker: “Trump goes too far declaring that the cities “breed crime.” He not only makes a correlation, but also ascribes a causation, without facts to support either.”

 

Claim: Putin’s a killer (experts say yes)

In the Super Bowl interview, O’Reilly pressed President Trump about his respect for Putin, saying “Putin’s a killer.” Trump’s response was “We got a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?” PolitiFact’s Graves reported on O’Reilly’s assertion that Putin is a killer, writing that “the political climate in Russia is responsible for a sizable amount of journalists murders in the country…. Many of the perpetrators are thought to be government and military officials and political groups.”

Claim: Three million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in November elections (no evidence)

Trump continued his unsubstantiated claim that three million undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the November election. When pushed on the need for evidence, Trump was undeterred, saying “[m]any people have come out and said I’m right. You know that.” PolitiFact repeated its finding that there is no evidence for this kind of voter fraud: “Trump’s claim is undermined by years of publically available information such as a report that found just 56 cases of noncitizens voting between 2000 and 2011.”

Claim: Nordstrom’s decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s apparel line was political (No evidence)

After Nordstrom dropped his daughter Ivanka Trump’s apparel line, President Trump attacked the decision as political. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, followed at a news conference saying, “[T]his is a direct attack on his policies and her name.” Reporting for The Washington Post Fact Checker, Lee cited an internal company email from November 2016, which states the company would continue to sell the brand as long as it was profitable. Then on February 2, Nordstrom announced it was dropping the line, because of “poor sales.” Lee gave the claim “four Pinocchios.”

Explainer: what is “Senate rule XIX” (rarely invoked)

During a Senate floor debate about the nomination of then Sen. Jeff Sessions, R., Ala., to be attorney general, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R., Ky., silenced Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D., Mass., as she read from a letter by Corretta Scott King. In doing so, he cited an obscure rule, known as Senate rule XIX, which reads: “[N]o Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.” PolitiFact reporter Louis Jacobson provided a useful primer on the rule, including statistics on how often it’s been invoked in Senate history: most likely, only twice, once in 1915 and another tie in 1952.

Katie Dahl is a research associate with the TV New Archive.